On relaxations and aging of various glasses

Slow relaxation occurs in many physical and biological systems. "Creep" is an example from everyday life. When stretching a rubber band, for example, the recovery to its equilibrium length is not, as one might think, exponential: The relaxation is slow, in many cases logarithmic, and can still be observed after many hours. The form of the relaxation also depends on the duration of the stretching, the "waiting time." This ubiquitous phenomenon is called aging, and is abundant both in natural and technological applications. Here, we suggest a general mechanism for slow relaxations and aging, which predicts logarithmic relaxations, and a particular aging dependence on the waiting time. We demonstrate the generality of the approach by comparing our predictions to experimental data on a diverse range of physical phenomena, from conductance in granular metals to disordered insulators and dirty semiconductors, to the low temperature dielectric properties of glasses.

Fluctuation-dissipation relations for Markov processes

The fluctuation-dissipation relation is calculated for stochastic models obeying a master equation with continuous time. In the general case of a nonstationary process, there appears to be no simple relation between the response and the correlation. Also, if one considers stationary processes, the linear response cannot be expressed via time-derivatives of the correlation function alone. In this case, an additional function, which has rarely been discussed previously, is required. This so-called asymmetry depends on the two times also relevant for the response and the correlation and it vanishes under equilibrium conditions. The asymmetry can be expressed in terms of the propagators and the transition rates of the master equation but it is not related to any physical observable in an obvious way. It is found that the behavior of the asymmetry strongly depends on the nature of the dynamical variable considered in the calculation of the correlation and the response. If one is concerned with a variable which randomizes with any transition among the states of the system, the asymmetry vanishes in most cases. This is in contrast to the situation for other classes of variables. In particular, for trap models of glassy relaxation, the fluctuation-dissipation ratio strongly depends on the observable and the asymmetry plays a dominant role in the determination of this ratio also if only neutral variables are considered. Some implications of a nonvanishing asymmetry with regard to the definition of an effective temperature are discussed.

Aging effects in an anderson insulator

Aging, commonly observed in glasses, is a manifestation of breakdown of time-translational invariance. Here we demonstrate experimentally aging effects in the electronic system of an Anderson insulator. The aging phenomenon in the electron glass appears to be much less sensitive to temperature than in other systems. The differences in the behavior of the electron glass and a spin glass system are discussed in terms of some microscopic differences between the two systems.